I recently finished Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World, and I would love to do a research project that pays tribute to Rosling and Gapminder. For that reason I’ll be using the Gapminder study.
The primary topic I’m interested in is the relationship between internet usage and female employment. I’m curious about whether or not access to the internet might play a role in increasing life expectancy. For that reason, the two variables I’ll focus on are “Internetuserate” and “lifeexpectancy”. However, at this stage I’m not going to exclude any variables. I’m not sure yet which variables might be related in important ways to my chosen variables, so I’m going to keep everything at the moment. After some exploratory data analysis and more research, I’ll have a better idea of which variables to focus on.
I’m also curious about the relationship between internet usage and employment rates. There’s a lot of discussion right now that the internet can help job seekers gain more skills and become more employable, and I’m curious to see how strong the relationship between these two things are. Because of this, I’ll also include the “employrate” variable in my analysis.
(Upon further reflection, “breastcancerper100” and “suicideper100” might be interesting variables to track as well, as they related to physical and mental health.)
I used Google Scholar and my search terms were as follows:
“internet access and life expectancy”
“internet access and employment rates”
My initial search for relevant information about education and life-expectancy yielded the following results:
A handful of articles finding a relationship between internet usage and life expectancy or general health:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268631883_Examining_the_Relationship_between_the_Internet_and_Life_Expectancy , Conference: 24th IBIMA Conference, At Milan, Italy
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5642753/ ,
BMJ Open. 2017; 7(7): e015839.Published online 2017 Jul 21. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2017-015839
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-10/uoc–lla102716.php
http://buscompress.com/uploads/3/4/9/8/34980536/riber_8-2_06_m18-053_70-80.pdf, Integrative Business and Economics Research, Vol. 8, Issue 2
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-015-1107-2 , Social Indicators Research volume 129, pages391–402(2016)
There doesn’t seem to have a tremendous amount of research on the subject, which is disappointing but I’m excited to see what results I get anyway.
In terms of internet access and employment rates, I was able to find a few studies that found a link between the two variables:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20161385 ,
AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
VOL. 109, NO. 3, MARCH 2019
(pp. 1032-79)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167624516300282 ,
Information Economics and Policy
Volume 40, September 2017, Pages 21-25
As well as one that found a negligible effect:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/000282804322970779 ,
AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
VOL. 94, NO. 1, MARCH 2004
(pp. 218-232)
To sum up:
My research questions are as follows:
“Is there a relationship between internet usage and life expectancy?” and beyond that “Is there a relationship between internet usage and employment rates”?
Based upon the sources I was able to find, I hypothesize there will be a positive relationship between internet usage and both life expectancy and employment rates. I would also expect breast cancer and suicide rates to trend down as internet access increases as they should be negatively correlated with life expectancy.
CriticallyCoding 